Tuesday, September 01, 2009

CTDG Blog

Did you know that the CTDG (Computer Textile Design Group) has now started up a blog? It is early days yet, but I think it is an excellent idea and a great way to be more interactive with members. I hope that we will see lots of wonderful images appearing on the blog, links to other people who share our interest in using the computer as a design tool for their textile work, and generally loads of interesting stuff.

However, it is really very new, and there is only a little bit up on the blog so far, so what we need to do is visit the blog, make comments, suggest links / content etc and see whether we can help get it up and running and full of intersting things.

Over to you!

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Frosty Consequences - The Full Story

We have finally got our act together and gathered all the images from our most recent game of Consequences here on the blog, and in our Picasa Web Album
For those that do not already know, we all started off with the same picture (chosen this time by Pat), and we each did a manipulation on it and passed it on to the next person. They then performed their magic on the image and passed it on again. So it went on until everyone had worked on everyone elses images.

The aim of the game was to get everyone exploring their own software on a regular basis, and therefore grow in understanding and confidence with their package. This helps us all to more effectively use the computer as a design tool, but it also gets everyone contributing to the group, regardless of level of expertise. It was NOT a specific aim of the game to produce beautiful designs ready for textiles at any stage of the process, but we all found ourselves delighted by some of the images. Individually we might well use some of them to develop further for our own textile work, however we each choose to express it.

If you want a more complete explanation please see some of the earlier posts, or check out the April issue of DesignIT, the magazine of the Computer Textile Design Group (CTDG)

The slide shows below give you a flavour of what we have been up to, but the best way to understand the transformations is to visit our Web Albums and click on any image to enlarge it.

Pat's Frosty Story
View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages




Erica's Frosty Story
View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages



Lesley's Frosty Story
View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages




Liz's Frosty Story
View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages




Jenny's Frosty Story
View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages




Ros's Frosty Story
View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages






Hilary's Frosty Story

View these images in larger scale at the DOT Group Web Album Pages

Monday, March 09, 2009

Frosty Consequences




Pat supplied this lovely image for us.


Our latest round of Consequences whizzed round the group without a hitch. There were some lovely images created, and some of us had trouble working out what to do with them as we liked them just the way they were. But that is not the name of the game, so we carried on making our changes and passing the images along. Once again it was amusing to see how often we almost reversed a transformation done by the previous person, without of course knowing that we were doing so. Pat had suggested that we retain the "frostiness" in our manipulations. This was very hard to achieve, particularly as we got further in to the game. Occasionally we threw the frostiness out of the window in favour of something summery or just plain lovely, but distinctly warm. At other times we managed to drag back a bit of winteriness, whether that was frosty or not is open to interpretation!


As we have 2 new members to the group (Welcome Jenny and Lesley), we decided it would be too time consuming to replicate everything on the computer so we worked through the A4 sheets without the aid of the computer, but we made notes of things people were unclear about or wanted to see demonstrated. After all the images had been considered and we had our long list of things to explore, the computer was turned on and we demonstrated (fumbled and bumbled) our way through the queries so that everyone was clear (!) about how things had been achieved. This was a much more efficient way of working, and concentrated the mind and exercised the brain cells all afternoon.



Rather than posting everything to the blog this time, we thought that we would upload the images to Picasa Web Albums and everyone can see in more detail the progression of each image. There are currently 3 peoples work to link to, but hopefully we will have every one's up and running very soon.



Go check out Erica's transformations: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/EricaMThomson/DotFrostA4Sheets#



Ros's Transformations: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/roswillis58/FrostConsequences?authkey=Gv1sRgCNHQ5JCzm6j_ggE&feat=email#



Liz's Transformations: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/lizziewelch01/DOTConsequencesFrosty#

When everyone has posted their images we will need to gather them together into the right "stories", but in the mean time you can follow each story by looking at the Web albums in the following order: Pat, Erica, Lesley, Liz, Jenny, Ros, Hilary. Start with one persons image (eg Frosty_Liz) and move to Jenny's web album (when it is up) and find Frosty_Liz_Jenny, then to Ros's web album and find Frosty_Liz_Jenny_Ros, and so on. If you do this for all 7 starting images, you can see that there are 49 A4 sheets with iterations on, and that is a lot of information - too much to put up on the blog in full.

The image below is the final iteration of my starting image, and as you can see, there is nothing recognisable left of the starting image, but having been transformed into bright colours at one stage of the game, it was dragged back into the appropriate winter season to finish up as a snowflake - most appropriate.




Monday, January 05, 2009

The story of my shell image is in the picture below. I used the magic wand to select some of the shells, and then turned them a bit pink. Erica tidied them up and made some more of them. Pat went wild and funky and Hilary obviously did not want so much green! She introduced a ripply filter which Ros then dribbled down the page and Chrissie made it into a mosaic. We all had fun, and everyone learn't a little bit more about their programmes. Slowly, slowly, we are all feeling a bit more in control; well, at least I think we are!

Friday, January 02, 2009

Hilary's Shell Image


This is my shell image as it travelled around the group. Ros built on what I had done but then it took some surprising twists. Like the others there is not much 'shelliness' left, but I love the colours of the last piece.
Hilary